So it just took me all night to figure out that in Xdebug ‘tracing’ is different to ‘profiling’.

It didn’t help that the xdebug.trace_output_name included an example format of ‘cachegrind.out.%s’. Why would you name a trace file cachegrind.out if only profile files are in cachegrind format!?

In my efforts to get profiling to work I found myself loading trace files into KCachegrind and getting the rather unhelpful message: “Could not open the file “/run/shm/xdebug/trace…xt”. Check it exists and you have enough permissions to read it.”

So the error message is about file permissions. I checked and checked and checked again but the file permissions were OK. The problem was I was loading a trace file, not a profile file.

So I gave up on KCachegrind and tried to get webgrind to work. Turns out loading a trace file (not a profile file) into webgrind doesn’t work either. I got the same problem reported by Sven about ‘parsers is undefined’. I fucked around trying to update the jquery.tablesorter plugin in webgrind, but the problem was due to the fact I was loading a tracing file, not a profiling file.

In the end I got it all figured out. Here’s my /etc/php5/mods-enabled/xdebug.ini file: